increase since 2010 of commuters from northern part of the Central Valley

J

ared Rusten saw the tide turning.

He had been renting a warehouse in San Francisco’s Mission District, where he worked and also lived with his then-girlfriend and another tenant, when they got their first rent increase in 2014: It doubled. The next year, his landlord wanted to increase the rent by another 30 percent. Rusten could see what was coming.

“We didn’t want to move to West Oakland to be there for three years and get priced out and have to move further east,” said Rusten, a furniture maker. “I have tens of thousands of pounds of equipment and wood. … We just decided to look for something to buy.”

Chance brought Rusten and his now-wife, Emily Oestreicher, to downtown Stockton in 2015. They were dropping her brother off at the train station, and everywhere they turned, it seemed, there was one abandoned warehouse after another, exactly the type of space growing scarcer every day in San Francisco and Oakland.

It was a city they had dismissed as downtrodden and crime-ridden, but now all they saw was potential. Stockton was close enough to maintain ties with his clients and suppliers and offered a historic downtown that would surely be on the rise, Rusten thought.

Video: From his new shop in Stockton, Jared Rusten explains why he couldn't stay in San Francisco and why he chose Stockton.

He was right.

As thousands in search of cheaper housing descend on far-flung cities such as Stockton, Lathrop, Tracy and Merced to the east, they’re changing the northern part of the vast Central Valley from a region with a distinct identity to a vast suburb of the Bay Area, whose economic and cultural life is inextricably linked to the vibrant locus some 60 to 120 miles west.

That transformation offers Bay Area workers the opportunity for cheaper housing in communities that now are adding the cultural amenities these workers have come to expect. But the trade-off is a crippling commute along a handful of clogged corridors, with few practical alternatives.

If the transportation challenge could be met, it would benefit not only Central Valley residents braving grueling drives down I-205 and I-580 on their way to Silicon Valley, the Tri-Valley and elsewhere in the Bay Area, said Jim Wunderman, president and CEO of the Bay Area Council, a business advocacy organization. It might also encourage more businesses to locate in Stockton and Tracy, knowing they could retain a tight connection to the core Bay Area, just an hour’s train ride away.

Living on the edge

Number of people commuting to the 9-county Bay Area from these major communities in neighboring but distant counties:

Source: 2017 American Community Survey

Video: Davinder Sohal tells us about his commute from River Island in Lathrop to San Ramon. He leaves for work at 3:30 a.m. and meets up with two co-workers along the way, one from Lathrop and another from Sacramento.

A daily grind

Davinder Sohal rises every weekday in pre-dawn darkness, heating water for his morning chai and spreading peanut butter on slices of wheat bread before slipping on shoes and sliding out his garage door around 3 a.m. for his job in San Ramon, a 45-minute trek — if he leaves before 3:30. It’s a ritual Sohal has honed over the past six years, ever since he and his family moved from Fremont to Lathrop in San Joaquin County, purchasing a three-bedroom home in 2013 for $240,000.

In September, the family of four moved from the city’s east side to a five-bedroom, which they purchased for $570,000, in a new development called River Islands. The master-planned community will double the size of Lathrop with 11,000 new homes over the next 20 years. Cambay Group, which is leading the development, has already built 1,200 houses in nine new neighborhoods and is poised to add 3,100 more. The vast majority of residents, says Susan Dell’Osso, a board director for the development, come from the Bay Area and have at least one member of the household still working there.

The result?

Randy Vazquez/Bay Area News Group

Haramrit Sohal, 6, walks on undeveloped road on the outskirts of the River Islands community in Lathrop. The Cambay Group development will double the size of the city over several decades with 11,000 new homes. Already, 1,200 have been built and another 3,100 homes are on the way.

“The commute is getting much worse,” Sohal said, adding that if he leaves after 4 a.m., the time he spends sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic more than doubles.

The evidence is on the roads.

More than 86,445 workers traveled a minimum of 60 miles, but oftentimes 120 miles or more, from the northern end of the Central Valley, which includes San Joaquin, Merced and Stanislaus counties, to jobs in the Bay Area in 2017 — a 43 percent increase since 2010, according to the Bay Area Council. The fastest-growing areas in the Central Valley also have the highest share of out-commuters, said Jeffrey Michael, the executive director of the University of the Pacific’s Center for Business and Policy Research.

San Joaquin County residents averaged 73-minute commutes each way, getting to jobs in the Bay Area in 2017, according to Census data compiled by the Bay Area Council. Motorists from Stanislaus County averaged 96-minute, one-way trips, coming in and out of the Bay Area. And commuters from Merced County averaged 98 minutes, compared to 32-minute commutes, on average, across the Bay Area.

But people are coming in from all over. Nearly 170,000 commuters from 12 neighboring counties, including those in the Central Valley, poured in for work in 2017, strong evidence the Bay Area’s reach is spreading far beyond its nine-county borders into a vast, 21-county megaregion, Wunderman said.

It’s a trend the Regional Plan Association, a national urban research and advocacy organization, first picked up on a decade ago. The association identified 11 emerging megaregions across the country, including the Pacific Northwest region of Seattle, Portland and Vancouver; the Arizona “Sun Corridor” of Phoenix and Tucson; the Southern California conglomeration of Los Angeles, San Diego, Anaheim, Long Beach and Las Vegas; and more. All are part of an urban revival that began in the 1990s and accelerated with the dot-com boom of the early 2000s, said Christopher Jones, a senior vice president and regional planner at the association.

Like the borders of metropolitan areas, Jones said megaregions can be hard to define. But, he said, they are generally large geographic areas with a constant flow of people, goods and information that begin to behave as one coordinated economy.

commuters by county

Total commuters from outside the 9-county Bay Area and their average trip time to the Bay Area in 2017:

Source: 2017 American Community Survey

“The Bay Area was already becoming more of a multi-centered region with the growth of Oakland and San Jose,” Jones said. “And if you look at the connection with Sacramento, you really start to see that the traditional Bay Area was not really capturing everything that was going on that was happening with housing markets and business institutions in the area.”

Whether that growth means more opportunities for both housing and jobs or complete gridlock will depend entirely on creating a functional commute, Wunderman said.

“It’s really at the point where it becomes functional that you get an economy of scale going in the Central Valley,” he said.

That “economy of scale” means a better balance of jobs closer to where people can afford to live, stronger ties between the Central and Silicon valleys, and alternatives to driving, Wunderman said. It’s why the council last year hosted a half-day forum with leaders from UC Merced, Merced city officials and others to talk about ways to foster more connections between the two regions. The city will be an important stop along the state’s high-speed rail route, which, if it’s completed, would offer commuters a quick and reliable commute.

And in the northern part of the Central Valley, local leaders hope a different train network — called the Valley Link — will provide more immediate relief to Interstate 580 commuters. The proposed 47-mile train route would run from BART’s Dublin/Pleasanton station to Stockton. The goal is to have trains running all day at 12-minute intervals between Dublin and Livermore, and 24-minute intervals between Livermore and North Lathrop, the proposed terminus of the new rail line’s first phase.

If all goes well, the train will begin carting passengers in 2026.

Only then, Wunderman said, will companies consider establishing satellite offices or relocating. “The companies are not going to do it if they can’t get their managers out there for meetings,” he said.

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Randy Vazquez/Bay Area News Group

Commuters headed west to the Bay Area board the ACE train at 4:39 a.m. at the Lathrop/ Manteca station.

Decades in the making

Establishing a rail link between the Bay Area and the Central Valley is the culmination of decades of migration — a push and pull of high Bay Area home prices leading workers to look elsewhere to live and a pattern of development that is playing out largely as economists predicted, said Bill Dean, the assistant director of development in Tracy.

The city conducted a study in the 1980s during its first wave of residential growth, wondering how it could attract more high-paying employers, he said. Residents would come first, then retail, Dean remembers the economists telling them, and higher-paying jobs would follow.

He likened it to the way Pleasanton, Dublin and Livermore grew from open ranches to large-scale suburbs, lured restaurants and retail and now have a booming high-tech industry.

“There was a lot of conscious planning looking to the future,” Dean said. “We’re close to this Bay Area thing, and in the long haul, we’ll be more of a player.”

The evidence of that progression already is playing out in places such as downtown Tracy, where its once-sleepy central drag is seeing a re-emergence of commerce and nightlife.

On a Sunday night in Tracy, the Purgatory Bar, which opened last year, was nearly full. A group of five women — all Bay Area émigrés of one kind or another — sat on sofas in front of an electric fireplace clutching craft cocktails. It was the first time since the bar opened that they had managed to grab a seat.

RANDY VAZQUEZ/Bay Area News Group

Tess Ramos-Cruz, right, laughs while having a drink with Christine Perio, left, at Purgatory Craft Beer & Whiskey Bar in Tracy. The chic bar is one of several eateries that have been popping up around Tracy as more Bay Area expats move into the area and look for amenities like the ones they left.

“

(The commuters) know what they had over there, and when they come, they want it over here, too,

”

-Scott Arganbright

Lifelong Tracy resident

“On a Friday or Saturday night, it’s crowded, it’s out the door,” said Christine Perio, who moved to Tracy 14 years ago. Perio works in real estate and runs a wellness spa in Livermore that she’s since expanded to Tracy. Only in the past few years, she said, has the downtown begun to see new restaurants, cafes and retail stores reminiscent of what she’d find in the Bay Area.

New Bay Area expats are bringing more cultural diversity, along with an interest in the arts and entertainment, said lifelong Tracy resident Scott Arganbright. City officials have responded by investing in the downtown area, installing new lighting, improving the streetscape and supporting community festivals.

“(The commuters) know what they had over there, and when they come, they want it over here, too,” Arganbright said. “What I see is positive. It’ll benefit me and my family and my neighbors, too.”

Larger employers are establishing a presence in Tracy and in nearby cities, as well, Dean said: Fisher Scientific, Tesla, Amazon, Medline and others. Their warehouses might be more focused on manufacturing than on higher-paying office jobs, but it’s just a matter of time until those employers move over the hill, too, said Mike Ammann, the executive director of the San Joaquin Partnership, a booster organization for the county’s business community.

“It’s gonna happen,” he said. “Over the next five years, you’ll see a pivot point where this (area) makes a lot of sense to a lot of people.”

Randy Vazquez/Bay Area News Group

The city of Tracy reopened the Grand Theater for the Arts as part of an economic downtown redevelopment. The 1923 theatre now serves as an interdisciplinary arts center.

New challenges, renewed promise

With more people moving into the area and more businesses popping up, some residents already are feeling the pinch of rising rents and home prices. Veronica Ramos moved from the Bay Area with her family to Tracy when she was just a child. She braved harrowing commutes to attend college in San Francisco before finding a job in Livermore in fashion and retail, the fields she studied.

But the recent graduate gave up a dream job in Livermore to work closer to home only to find she couldn’t afford to live in Tracy anymore, she said. She moved to the Sacramento area for a little more financial freedom and now commutes into the Central Valley, a trend Ammann said is becoming more common. Rents grew an average of 6 percent last year in Tracy, compared to 3 percent in Sacramento.

“I had to sacrifice doing what I wanted to do to get a job out here,” Ramos said. “But it wasn’t enough for me to afford to live here and still go out.”

In Stockton, where politics have long skewed red and Bay Area progressives dismiss the city as backwards, Mayor Michael Tubbs has drawn national attention with bold poverty-busting policies that focus on childhood education and social services to combat crime.

It’s one of the reasons Rusten could see himself relocating there, he said. And it spurred the sibling trio, Phoenix, Malachi and Mirabi Trent, to establish a nonprofit maker-space, called HATCH Workshop, in Stockton. With HATCH and interior decor company Most Modest — which got its start in South San Francisco and officially moved to Stockton in September — Rusten sees the start of a craftsman community that could lure more Bay Area artisans east.

After all, that’s what drew Rusten there — the potential to be part of something bigger.

Working in San Francisco’s Mission District, it was hard to feel engaged with the local community, he said. The problems seemed too big, the players too powerful. In Stockton, he sits on the downtown alliance’s board of directors. He helped Most Modest and HATCH find spaces to operate. It feels as if he can actually be part of turning a once-struggling city with a reputation for crime into a destination.

“In San Francisco, at that time, we just felt like the first wave of gentrifiers, and it didn’t feel good,” Rusten said. “The thing that’s so exciting with downtown Stockton is that so much of it was just abandoned. There was nobody to displace. It’s like a blank canvas.”

Randy Vazquez/Bay Area News Group

A once-sleepy downtown Stockton is seeing renewed investment as a number of new eateries, including the Trail Coffee Roasters, Cast Iron Trading Co., Channel Brewing, open up.

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About the author

Erin Baldassari covers transportation, the Bay Area's housing shortage and breaking news. She served on the East Bay Times' 2017 Pulitzer Prize winning team for its coverage of the Ghost Ship fire. But most of all, she cares deeply about local news and hopes you do, too. If you'd like to support local journalism, please subscribe today. Follow Erin on Twitter at @e_baldi.